Shaper Origin: Hand-Held CNC Machine | Hacker News Reader

Shaper Origin: Hand-Held CNC Machine

shapertools.com

140 pointsspking68 comments

I was part of the preorder and just finished my first project with it, an MFT style workbench (3x5). My prior woodworking experience was a single class in high school. I would likely not have attempted this project without access this tool.

The software works off of SVG files, which was appealing as this is a format I'm already accustomed to. They have made a plugin for exporting SVG from Fusion360 models. The workflow to go from idea to a finished prototype is pretty quick.

Price for me was competitive, I had been looking at laser cutters which start at 2x-3x the price of this. Obviously not a direct comparison in capabilities.

Overall, I'm quite happy with it

Looks cool, and I guess I'm old and illogical - but I miss the 'old days' when you could just buy things without teasers, pre-announcements, order windows, etc.

I doesn't build excitement in my case, more that I forget about it and move on.

I feel you, but also having been on the other side of things (worked for a hardware startup in the AR space), whoo boy is hardware hard.

From the side of the manufacturer, all the things you mentioned are a form of risk mitigation and demand forecasting. It's likely a fatal, company ending mistake to build 5x too many in your initial run.

So, while I'm not a huge fan of such activities, I am a HUGE fan of the devices and creativity they enable as otherwise we just wouldn't see this kind of stuff.

Totally agree, more just commenting the large number of products I probably would've bought on sight had they been available, but instead are forgotten or in some old bookmark somewhere due to being unavailable.

You seem to gloss over the old days where we got teasers and pre-announcements in the form of interviews, tradeshow reports, and PR photos in trade magazines. They were just doled out at a much lower frequency than today, but then that's pretty much true of everything else, too.

You need this stuff when in the old days, current days and future days, people will replace your product with a mere pencil. Measure, mark, cut.

I tried one of these 2-3 years ago and briefly talked to one of the founders. It's a really cool tool, and surprisingly fun to use. I was immediately smitten and asked "how much?" The price he told me then was half the price they're advertising now, and I still balked. Admittedly I don't know the market for carpentry, but it seems like a niche product for professionals or rich hobbyists. That said though, I'd still love to have one.

What price are they advertising now? I can’t find it on the linked page.

$2400 is the expected retail price.

Thanks! Considering what it does, I’m not surprised, but it’s a bit rich for my blood.

Seems about on par with Festool options, and looks like they are partners.

At that price they are competing with options that you don’t have to babysit, which is a big advantage if you are commercial operator.

Yeah, but they're also operating in the "maker space", where ten people all pitch in $250 and buy a tool for everyone else to use. That $2400 buys you a tool that everyone, including kids, can use, as opposed to a real CnC machine that requires someone to become an expert operator needing to babysit anyone else who has an idea that requires CnC work.

This tool has zero appeal to commercial operators. But it's _INCREDIBLE_ for people who just want to make shit at their community center/hacker space/woodworking group/etc.

I dunno that this is really any easier to use than a Shapeoko, which is $1900 for the largest version (33" x 33" x 3" working area) with router included. The software for Shapeoko is pretty idiot proof, it can do a 2D carve from an SVG file with no more difficulty than the Origin, while you also have the ability to do 2.5 and 3D operations, which I don't think the Origin can do very well if at all.

There's some cases where the Origin would be killer (e.g., DIY furniture), but I feel like for most makers a stationary CNC router is a better choice. There are some really good, easy to use options at that price point, $2400 seems a bit crazy.

Idiotproof is in the eye of the beholder. Shapeoko is simple for people already exposed to far more complex tools, like machining centers, knee Mills, etc.

But for people who have never understood any of those tools on a low level, it remains indistinguishable from magic.

Thus, this tool is far more accessible to a complete novice, in terms of what they are comfortable exploring.

I'd say the Shapeoko is actually a bit easier to use than a 3D printer (a makerspace staple)- you don't have to do any of the more complicated CNC/CAM things like creating toolpaths or calculating feedrates if you just want to carve an SVG, the software does it all automatically. The machines are a bit more dangerous so you need to take more safety precautions, but the overall process is less fiddly than a 3D printer or more advanced CNC jobs (though the Shapeoko can also do that).

I mean I get it, the Shaper is neat and I do see the appeal. I just can't help but thinking the price is too high for what you're getting considering that the alternatives are pretty good too, as well as far more capable for a lot of uses. If they had hit the $1500 mark I'd probably be considering one myself but man $2400 is pretty steep for a router with autopilot.

Is this really kid safe ?

I used a band saw as a kid; this is probably at least as safe.

What does "kid safe" mean? Is it safe once you explain the kid how to use it, and supervise while they pay attention to what they're doing? Of course it's kid safe.

Is it safe to go "this is how you use it" and then walk away from your hyperactive kid who doesn't even want to be there? Of course not =)

It's safe for any human who actually wants to use it to make things.

When I was 9, I managed to chop off the last 3/16th of an inch of my left thumb with a simple hatchet.

(Building a fort...)

Pre/post hatchet moment, many many many serious power tools and no incidents.

The key to anything is paying attention.

Depends on your kid

Depends on the parent.

But at that price, they're well into the lower end of real CNC machine territory. This still requires hands on for "gross motor control". That's time a person can't spend doing other stuff.

With a real CNC, you plonk your board in, zero it and click Go and your parts emerge some time later. Saving time is important for the professional user.

My favorite youtube engineer (Ben Krasnow) did a video on this product a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8GFpSCK6Jk

I own one. It comes with autodesk 360 for a year. Truth be told, this thing is solid as a tank and incredibly well built. Makes inlays a breeze and does a faultless job at basic tasks.

The best part is that all the capabilities are in a small box so you don’t need a room to store it and it’s portable.

It can take a long time to do larger projects and you can’t fire it up and forget it, but it’s an exceptionally good product.

Brilliant idea, outsource to the human the low-precision positioning task and get rid of the workpiece fixtures for massive price reduction.

Now someone needs to build the equivalent for 3-5 axis, maybe with a free movable support arm since it might be too heavy to hold just with hands.

Honestly,I wonder if this concept isn't better suited for welding robots and plasma cutters. It seems ideally suited for those tools. You need precise control of a tool position, and the reason,they're not done by hand more right now is that access to the workpiece and clamping it in place are a huge pain.

A big problem with handheld CNC is that cutting many materials you'd want to cut requires precise control of your speed, and also requires rather large amounts of force and rigidity. CNC in wood or plastic is pretty easy, but steel is hugely more difficult. There's a reason traditional mills are made with thousands of pounds of cast steel, and it's not to make it hard for hobbyists to enter,

I wonder if a 3-5 axis might be better done by using servo-actuated brakes to constrain your motion to a desired direction and speed. Though I remain skeptical that the problem with CNC is the expense of long axes. You pay for the power, not length - a 30" ballscrew actuator costs maybe 2x as much as a 3".

The benefit I see is not the expense of doing long axes, but the problem with storing them. I can put a Shaper Origin away in a cupboard in the garage when I'm done, the 4x8 CNC at my makerspace takes up around as much space as a car, and hasn't been moved in years.

You seem to know way more about the fields so I defer, but I think there is a market for just cutting wood, plastic or soft metals like aluminum. A low cost machine obviously will have a bunch of limitations.

2400$ isn't exactly low-cost.

It's definitely not cheap, but its in the ball park for CNC wood routers (obviously you can find cheaper stuff, especially if second hand).

There's value to some hobby users in that it looks like you get to save on bench space. For some users that might be the difference between having and not having a CNC wood router.

Why wouldn’t a $1400 dollar shapeoko or x-carve be better than this?

This doesn't take up an enormous amount of shop space, can be used on arbitrarily large workpieces, and probably requires far less calibration and maintenance work. I have a 2' x 2' CNC router and can easily think of usecases this would be better for. A 4' x 8' CNC router is sure as hell not going to be cheaper than this thing.

I wonder how accurately it would work on a 4' x 8' piece. If I cut some curvy shape near the edge of the piece and followed the dashed line perfectly, would I end up exactly back where I started or would I miss by half an inch?

It uses strips of QR codes to position itself on the workpiece. It's an absolute measurement not a relative one, so there's no drift.

Got to play with one of these for a few hours 2-3 years ago, back then it was pretty easy to make a shape and upload it to the device. The cuts it made on plywood were extremely clean and it was quite fun to use! Hooked up a vacuum to it and it sucked up a lot of the wood dust, so that wasn't too much of a problem.

Only problem was I had to concentrate when moving the device around on the wood since otherwise it would move outside the allowable range and I'd have to reset it.

I'd imagine that this would be for one-off products since otherwise a true CNC machine would save more time.

CNC is a misnomer. This is more like GPS for a router. Computer assisted machining would be more appropriate though that acronym would collide with CAM, computer aided manufacturing.

It doesn't just show you the tool's position relative to the workpiece, it also has motors that correct the position of the cutting bit.

Sounds pretty CNC to me.

And IIRC (saw this thing years ago), it quickly retracts the bit and tells you that you're an idiot if you move out of range.

It's still a numerically controlled fabrication tool, well within the definition of CnC. It's just a hardware implementation where the broad motor control is offloaded to the human operator, with fine adjustment kept in-tool.

Computer-assisted would imply that the human is responsible for the milling, and the computer helps.

Here, the computer performs all milling and measurements, but rely on a human to move the machine to where the work needs to be completed, posting instructions on a screen to the human as to where to put the machine. This is simply to optimize machine size, as a full plate CNC mill is a pretty big beast.

TL;DR: This is a human-assisted CNC router.

We got one for our makerspace and it is a very solid tool. Amazing for parquet.

I bought an $8000 4'x8' router table back in 2003 and built a a bunch of stich-and-glue kayaks with it. I could cut a table of parts while eating lunch from one sheet of marine plywood. With this I may save space, but I have to be present to cut all of those parts without tiring. I doubt hand control of the shaper can beat the accuracy. It's a neat, high-priced toy for makers (I'm one), but if you are going to make more than a few things regularly, go with a router table. I also made 3D carvings or portraits by writing a python script in Blender3D for the geometry, and there's no way you could do that by hand. I really like the Shaper, and I think it will sell, but it is a niche product. It also reminded me of the time I used a projector to, project cut-out templates on ply because I didn't need accuracy, and when I did we would plot out templates to transfer to the plywood, and then cut with a hand router by eye.

I've been looking at products in this space myself lately, and stumbled upon the Maslow, which has similar, though not identical functionality, but is a DIY product an order of magnitude cheap than this (though obviously far less polished and producty): http://www.maslowcnc.com/

I really want to like the Maslow, but I admit I'm losing patience with it. After a multi-month waiting period to get it I found that they hadn't shipped me all the parts. After a chat with their co-founder (who was very nice) I assumed all was taken care of, but it's been something like two weeks since then and still no parts. In the time it's taken just to get the Maslow kit I could easily have designed and built my own.

Very disappointing. Like I say, I want to like and support what seems to be a really nice company. I just don't have a product yet.

would be really cool if someone tried to DIY this using some lighthouse/vive tracking instead of the camera and markers.

It's confusing to call this a "shaper," when it is not the machine tool. (A shaper is a kind of linear lathe.)

this battle was lost generations ago. Shapers were "mechanical apprentices" wielding chisels replaced by low speed specialized cutter horizontal milling machines (borrowed from circular saws from timber mills) replaced with high speed vertical milling machines with fewer smaller diameter cutters and fancy fixtures, replaced by CNC mills.

Somewhere in there, probably along with vertical mills, beefy router tables adopted the name "Shaper" as it was not being used enough by the mechanical apprentices to say so any more.

But I love watching the hypnotic motions of a metal shaper more than I will ever like even hearing a wood shaper, in another room ... while wearing earmuffs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_shaper

There are multiple kinds of shapers. Plus, give them a little poetic leeway.

My biggest problem is not being able to get sharp corners. Thats not a problem with Shaper Origin per se, but more with CNC based routers (note the chess board on their homepage, it doesn't have squares with 90 deg corners). If something like Shaper Origin supported being able to do this, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

You only cannot get sharp internal corners. External corners can be square/arbitrarily sharp. I don't think it's too big of a problem, usually you want things rounded to relieve stresses anyway, but indeed I can see situations such as aesthetics or piece compatibility this could be an issue.

Sharp internal corners are hard period. CNC milling machines have the same issue -- the usual way to to just use a smaller end mill.

You either need some type of punch or an (actual) shaper.

That's what square hole drill bits are for.

Those round the corners too I'm afraid.

At first glance it looked like the motion control was gamified with a driving game. Part of me wishes that was the case, the other part of is horrified of the thought of carpenters messing around with cloud enabled gameboys on their tools.

> Shaper Origin: Hand-Held CNC Machine

As it hand-held machine, then it's NOT a CNC[0] by design...

> Computer numerical control (CNC) is the automation of machine tools by means of computers executing pre-programmed sequences of machine control commands. This is in contrast to machines that are manually controlled by hand wheels or levers, or mechanically automated by cams alone.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_control

It's still numerically controlled. 'Hand-held' just refers to its size, not how it's operated.

All the pictures I'm seeing are showing it being controlled by hand.

Yeah I was confused by this also. It is cutting a precise vector shape by making small adjustments to compensate for hand shake and such. The "circle" you can see it drawing on screen is the amount of error it can tolerate before it will start cutting in the wrong place.

Actually looks like it's a hybrid approach: you have to move it by hand within a certain range of the path it's attempting to follow/cut, but the path it actually cuts when within range is determined by path data given to it (in the form of an SVG it looks like).

Similar packaging and probably marketing to fein gear.... Fancy case and some pretty looking tools but tbh I don't see that piece of equipment ever making it into the workshop and it barely looks like it would survive a week on-site too. 2500 dollary doos is pretty damned expensive for what looks to be a damned fragile bit of gear with very little use.

Like the biggest problem to making cuts with a router is that it grabs and pulls and goes off direction. Having a little map of where your "supposed to go" isn't going to prevent this.. So I see this thing doing nothing to make your job's/cuts more accurate. Yes it maps it for you...but so does a projector and a pencil and then your not limited to the size or shape of the router...just the skill of the operator.

If it was priced say...450 or maaaaaaaaaaaaybe 750 aud? It would possibly get a look in? I get a makita for like 200 bucks that will take a thrashing on site and a dewalt for like 600 if you want a few extra ponies under the bonnet. But christ...2500 dollary doos. I can buy half a chippies work truck for that! In the famed words of the castle "tell em' he's dreamin!"

I'm not sure you understand what this is. It's not a router, it's a handheld 4'x8' CNC. If Makita has a 4x8 CNC for 200 bucks, it's news to me. :-)

It doesn't have "a little map of where you're supposed to go", it has a display showing where it is going to go. Now, I don't drive my router every day (a Bosch, FYI), so I'll admit I'm not a skilled operator. But my ability to follow a pencil line with a router is iffy at best.

You are right that the biggest problem to making cuts with a router is it grabbing and going off path. That isn't so much a problem with a CNC. I don't know how the Shaper, being hand-held rather than a mounted chassis, prevents kicking out like that. I don't know if it stops cutting when you move the body, or is fast enough to move the tool when you are repositioning the body and the tool grabs.

The Shaper's goal is that an unskilled operator can do accurate and repeatable cuts.

That said, I haven't used the Shaper. I've watched some folks over the years use them on YouTube, and I've half wished I'd bought the older model when they had it for pre-order for $1,500.

But the downside of these tools is that you can't just whip them out and start making chips, you've got to have CAD and CAM experience and generate the gcode. I've done a little with 3D printers, and SketchUp, and custom gcode. But I'm far from being able to bang out a set of shapes for a one-off project. I'd have to be making a few or more of something before I even considered it.

The Shaper looks insanely cool, and I wish our Maker Space had one, but I also don't have an immediate need for one either. I CAN tell you that I've recently been wishing our 4x8 CNC took up a lot less floor space, it's bigger than either of our workbenches but can't be used as a work surface (policy decision).

"It's not a router, it's a handheld 4'x8' CNC."

So your telling me its a handheld 4x8 computer numeric controlled... nothing? its a handheld cnc router. I know what cnc mills are having given extensive consideration to building one (bit bigger than 4x8 though as that's too small, maybe more like 2000x6000 because yes I like to build shit and timber comes in 6 metre lengths.

Unless the tool has some serious way of gripping it to the surface its milling, its gonna be generally useless for anything other than light timbers/particle board. I'd love to see it try and cut through some tallow wood or iron bark accurately. Hell even a bit of red gum would probably thrash it out.

Actually it's a little of both. You do have to guide it by hand according to the map it shows, however it will correct small deviations from the path allowing relatively accurate cuts.

It has two huge downsides over a regular router: you have to place marker tape (quite expensive) all over the workpiece, and it will stop working once the marker tape is cut. Also, you have to keep guiding it throughout the process so you don't get the time benefit (multitasking) of a regular CNC router.

I don't think it's a really good choice for a makerspace actually compared to a regular router table, unless there is a serious lack of space.

It does not stop working when the tape is cut, only when there isn't enough visible tape. Also, you can put tape on a place outside where you are cutting and reuse it. The camera isn't pointing down where it is cutting. Also, it'll correct for fairly large deviations. It is more for one-off things as opposed to madd producing something like standard CNC router. Limitless size is nice, I am unlikely to buy a 4'x8' CNC router for my garage.

Indeed, it makes more sense at home rather than in a makerspace. But you'd be very unlikely to make the money back compared to sending it out to a professional shop. It could be perfect for interior designers and similar jobs where one-off pieces have to be cut on the spot and cost isn't a big issue.

The issue about the cut tape was brought up in the "Tested" review, and you may not always be able to put tape outside your work area if you are trying to use your whole workpiece.

I just don't see a router table serving a similar need. Unless by that you mean a CNC like a Shapeoko or similar, rather than one of those tables with a fence and a router poking up underneath it.

As far as a lack of space, there's ALWAYS a lack of space at maker spaces. :-)

Hand router buddy, they exist. Router tables are generally used for edging/mitering/straight cuts. Hand routers are for doing narly shit preferably you want one with plunge capabilities so you can just ram it down where the cut starts and you don't have to pre-drill or cut it in from some angle.

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